The Squirrel Game

A cute game for 5-10 year olds. You are a squirrel running around the forest in a figure-eight track, picking up pine cones to bring back to your hoard (which you can enter once every lap). The first squirrel to gather 15 pine cones in his hoard wins. Spaces on the track give you one to three pine cones when you land on them, and the special die makes you lose your move now and then --instead, every squirrel gets a free pine cone. The tricky part is that your wheelbarrow tips over and loses its contents whenever you exceed its capacity: six pine cones. Every other squirrel laps the track in the opposite direction to yours, so there are plenty of squirrel encounters. Every time you leap over another squirrel (going one way or the other), you can steal from or give to him up to three of your cones. Therein lies all the strategy.